Students Outpacing Teachers With Online Skills

beaverfever writes: "The Christian Science Monitor ran this commentary by Tom Regan on how students in middle and high school are outpacing their teachers when it comes to understanding the potential of and using the internet for learning and doing research. The article addresses a study, The Digital Disconnect, recently released by the Pew Internet and American Life Project. Regarding the study, Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Internet & American Life Project, is quoted: 'Educators have a choice: Either they need to adapt or they will be dragged into a new learning environment.' Both the study and article are about two weeks old, but an interesting read nonetheless."

Comments

it's called "free time"

[Sebastopol]

teachers spend 8-12 hours a day in the classroom, then go home and try to relax. free time? hah. like any adult, it's just the weekends.

students spend 6 hours in the classroom, and if they don't have extracurricular activities or a job, they get to surf until the wee hours of the morning.

not a big surprise.

hire professionals

[Apreche]

When I was in high school I knew more about computers than anyone else in the building. I knew more than the net admins too. Their security consisted of removing icons from desktop and start menu. By pressing F3 getting find files and folders, then right clicking to get windows explorer, I was able to run nwadmin.exe and change anything. I was really tempted to change the mayor's password.

Anyway there is only one way to get quality tech education in high school/middle school. You have to hire a professional. I wont go into detail about how completely awesome that would be. If my high school had a full time employee who knew more about computers than anyone else there it would have been great. I wouldn't have to deal with stupid teachers thinking I'm "hackign the schools network" when I'm installing Macromedia flash player.
The problem is that no non-university will pay a salary as good as what you could get working for a real IT firm. Even college professors work "real" jobs in the summer because they make so much more money that way.
A big problem is that attitude that you just have to have the computers in the school and everythign else will follow. I see these public schools with labs and labs full of too-powerful computers that are only used for MS-Office. I ask why they have GForce2s, they don't know they're never ever going to run any application that has a scrath of OpenGL or Direct3D in it. If they spent that money more wisely they could have hired a pro to work for them full time, maybe even teach, and help them make better buying decisions. But they didn't hire a person before buying, so now they can't afford to hire anyone.
I don't think they can afford a real IT salary anyway. At least not a public school. But if they did you can expect the face of computer education to change greatly.

I'm seeing a freshman year of high school class required for all students in which they learn how a computer works (what are the parts, what do they do) and how to build one and set it up. BIOS OS. Windows, Linux, Mac. Once you know that much, everything else falls into place, unless you are a techie. The problem is people just learn "click, click, type, click".

So, this is to all you schools out there. Hire people like us, we will help you! You just have to pay us what we're worth.

I dunno

[Otter]

...94 percent of that number had used the Internet as a major research source for a recent major school project.

I find this more disturbing than encouraging. Web searches are great for looking up facts or getting a quick overview of a topic. But except for very recent topics or technological subjects, Internet research is going to be far, far inferior to what you can do in even a realtively poor library.

Web searches are easy, fast and don't involve going anywhere. But when I've been dragged in to help teenage relatives and neighbors with papers and seen the stack of printouts they're working from, I always wind up telling them they're going to need to visit the library.

Fundamental flaws in American K-12 education

[Infonaut]

Warning: Rant follows

1) Teachers suffer from low pay and low respect in most of the country. I blame much of this on the power of the NEA, which is a classic example of a bureaucracy that exists to perpetuate its own existence. If the NEA advocated in favor of more rigorous screening, performance reviews, and salaries based not on seniority but on parent reviews, student reviews, peer reviews, and testing performance, teachers might have a chance. But as it is, the NEA aggressively fights to "protect" teachers. Of course all this does is perpetuate stereotypes about teachers being slackers who want to work 9 months out of the year. Try being a full-time teacher in the US without also being a member of the NEA - it doesn't happen.

2) District-based funding, coupled with per-seat attendance rules mean that schooling is about cramming as many students into the classrooms as possible. School districts, be they rural or urban, rich or poor, almost always suffer from bloated bureaucratic structures and mismanagement. An atmosphere of entitlement ("We dedicate our lives to helping children, so you can forgive our mistakes") permeates these organizations. This of course stems from antiquated concepts of tenure and lifetime employment in the education system. Hell, even the US Government doesn't offer the kind of guaranteed work for life contract that most school districts provide.

3) Ultimately, American K-12 education is more about socialization and keeping children out of trouble than it is about truly educating them. Because family structures have fallen apart, teachers are expected to be caretakers first, and educators second. How on earth can teachers focus on using technology effectively when they barely even get the opportunity to teach?

I've done technology volunteer work for schools in places all over the country, and one consistent trend I see is that charter schools make far better use of the money they have, and leverage technology better than traditional public schools. Too many Americans are content with the status quo, because they figure the NEA and the national political parties know best. They're afraid of changing the system for fear of ruining American K-12 education. The thing is, it's already screwed up, and the time for change is now.

Schools slow to catch on

[octalgirl]

'Educators have a choice: Either they need to adapt or they will be dragged into a new learning environment.'

I left the commercial world to work for IT in school systems 7 years ago. This statement was true then and unfortunately it still is. Some teachers, given the proper training, are up to it, and have come a long way. Others still don't know how to turn their computers on. This is one of the reasons for the continual attempt for things like the Childrens Online Protection Act. Schools won't get federal funding for technology if they won't install a Internet filter. I am against such strong-arm tactics, but I do know that there are many teachers who do not pay attention while kids as young as ten are giggling at p0rn. And if a student simply minimizes the browser, the teacher is lost.